Are some children just born bad? - It used to be thought there was no such thing as wicked children, only inadequate parents. Try telling that to these despairing families
There is no such thing as bad children - only bad parents has long been the mantra of child experts.
The firm belief being that an individual is shaped by nurture and not pre-decided by nature.
After all, studies have shown us that offspring of the violent and abusive often turn out to be highly troubled adults themselves. But what if a child is born into a loving, caring home and still goes off the rails?
And what if the child's siblings, who have been raised in that same loving household, have turned out perfectly fine - whose fault is it then?
Astonishingly, some psychiatrists accept that previous thinking was flawed and that some children, through no fault of the parents, are simply bad seeds. In other words: born bad.
Gloria Harding is one mother who is relieved to learn of this new theory after years of questioning her parenting skills when her once promising son became a violent, aggressive drug user.
The low point came when Gloria, a retired marketing consultant, had to take refuge in her own house while Bobby, then 18, screamed abuse at her as he systematically smashed up the five-bedroom family home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.
He had been brought up with every possible advantage, including a private education, but Gloria was at her wits' end over her son. The happy, sweet-natured boy who had shown such early promise had grown into a teenager who was completely out of control.
'I thought I must have been a terrible mother, but the truth was that Bobby was only ever wanted, loved, praised and encouraged, as was his sister.'
Gloria lives with her husband Trevor (Bobby's stepfather) in the £1.5 million house in which Bobby was brought up. Her son, meanwhile, is 27 and living in residential care after a series of violent and distressing episodes that left Gloria and Trevor unable to have him in the family home.
By comparison, his 31-year-old sister is a loving, responsible parent. So was Bobby simply a bad seed?
In a recent article in The New York Times, respected psychiatrist Dr Richard Friedman admitted that his profession is beginning to accept that some children are 'toxic'. '
For years, mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good unless influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behaviour, there must be a bad parent behind it,' he says.
'Yet the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children.'
Certainly, Gloria can't identify any reason why Bobby should have become so violent.
'He was a lovely child. I sent him to a private prep school, and that's when our problems began,' she says. 'He became disruptive in class and struggled to learn. I feel he was dyslexic - but his behaviour exceeded this relatively straight- forward problem.
'I took him out of private school and put him into a state school, where they were willing to get a statement of special needs for him - his private school didn't want to know and I felt isolated, as if it was my fault. Meanwhile, his sister excelled at the same school.'
Gloria was working full-time and employed a nanny to help care for her children. She and Bobby's father divorced when he was eight and, a year later, she married Trevor, who has been a consistent and loving father figure to Bobby.
'We weren't overly strict with him, and he was brought up in a very caring home. He had everything, materially, he could ever have wanted,' says Gloria. 'He rode bikes with his friends, we had lovely holidays, he was a great skier and scuba diver. Yet he could not settle - there was something "not right" within him. There was so much anger inside him.'
At state school he attained six GCSEs, then went to agricultural college, where he started to experiment with drugs, which only fuelled his aggressive behaviour. Gloria struggled to cope.
'We had to keep every door in the house locked. He would punch holes in his bedroom walls, scream and break things,' she says. 'He once threw all the contents of his bedroom out of the window. I became terrified of my own son. In the end I called social services and the police because I feared for my safety after he threatened me with a screwdriver.'
Bobby was professionally assessed and ruled not to be mentally ill, but a 'drug addict with behavioural problems'.
Events culminated with Bobby stealing his mother's Jaguar XK8, wrapping it round a tree and cracking his pelvis. Over the next year he was charged with criminal damage and sent to Feltham Young Offenders Prison in West London.
Since then he has served sentences in a further three secure units. 'I will never stop loving him and I will never desert him, but I fear so much for his future. I am tormented by the thought that maybe it is all my fault,' says Gloria.
'I believe his cannabis use was a highly destructive influence. Maybe, somewhere, I did something wrong, but for the life of me I can't think what.'
Leading British child psychologist Dr Pat Spungin says: 'There will always be children who are much more difficult to parent than others. While I am reluctant to label children bad seeds, I think certain children are born with much less susceptibility to influence.
'Psychologists recognise that there are temperamental differences in babies from birth. The nature versus nurture argument will always be an ongoing one, but I know, from my own work, that there are children who are born with less empathy and understanding of people and who care much less about the consequences of their actions and the effects on other people.'
This is something with which Carole Heywood can strongly identify. Carole, who lives in Guildford, Surrey, is an accountant and mother of three. For the past seven years, she has been enduring a living hell with her 19-year-old son, Mark.
Though he'd been a relatively happy and secure child, at 12 he began to rebel. To Carole's bewilderment he started drinking, experimenting with drugs and skipping school.
'We treated all our three children exactly the same, and I have rarely a moment's worry with his brother or sister. But Mark became like a wild thing,' she says.
'He'd previously been a good student but at 13 he was expelled from school. I could not see where this had come from. He was put into a unit for excluded children, and at one stage had home tuition.
'Our lives became a living hell because of his unruly behaviour. All the hopes and dreams I'd had for him - growing up, going to university, getting married and having children - have all gone.'
In a bid to get him to stay at the unit, Carole would drive him there herself, but he'd jump out of the car and run off, sometimes disappearing for days. At home, he smashed windows and doors, and swore at and threatened his brother and sister.
At 15, he tipped a kettle of boiling water over his sister. 'I yelled at Mark, saying he could have killed her, but he just shrugged. He didn't give a fig. My son felt like a stranger. I didn't know who he was,' says Carole.
Mark was arrested for assaulting his sister and taken into the care of social services. Carole admits it sounds like a plotline from EastEnders, not something she ever expected to happen in her comfortable, middle-class home.
'I had to have a panic alarm put into my house, in case my son turned up and tried to hurt me,' she says. Mark was put onto an anger management course and given counselling. But still he returned to the house, stealing the family's DVD player, mobile phones and anything he could sell for drug money.
'He's facing charges for criminal assault,' says Carole. 'Where has this come from? This isn't a child who has been dragged up. He's had a secure, comfortable upbringing with two parents who love him.
'Today, I love him, but I don't like him. His behaviour drove me to a nervous breakdown because I thought I was to blame. Now, though, I think he is simply toxic and not a good person.
'There is no empathy, no understanding of other people's suffering and all he ever thinks about is himself. He's often on the phone to me, about how everything is so unfair and his life is a mess. But he had every chance and threw it all away.'
Another leading child psychiatrist, Dr Theodore Shapiro, says: 'The era of "There are no bad children, only bad parents" is gone. The central pitch of any child psychiatrist now is that the illness is often in the child. The family response may aggravate it, but not wholly create it.'
WHO KNEW?
George and Nicole Douglas, ten-year-old twins, were born with every possible advantage. Their parents, Doug, 55, and Sandra, 49, dote on them and work hard to give them the best possible life. There is a swimming pool in the back garden, holidays abroad, endless treats and new clothes - and yet they have often made their parents' lives hell.
Doug, who is a customer services agent, lives with Sandra, who works in administration, in Stanwell, Middlesex.
'I can only think that we have given them too much. They are much better now, but when they were younger we would be covered in bruises,' he says. 'They shouted, swore, kicked and threw things at us. We were close to the end of our tether.'
Being twins, Doug feels they ganged up against their parents. 'We never raised a hand or a voice to our children. Both of us grew up in poor, but loving households, and we wanted to give our children everything, materially, we hadn't had,' he says.
Eerily, the twins began speaking their own private language, terrorising their parents.
'They knew their rights, too,' says Doug. 'If I tried to tell them off, they said: "I'll call Childline!" We didn't know what to do.'
Both children were well-behaved out of the home, and, Doug says, 'positive angels' at school. 'They're bright and good at sport. Things come easily to them. 'I just sometimes feel I don't know them. I don't know what they are thinking, ever. They'll be perfect at school, then they come home and the trouble starts.'
The situation, he says, is getting better and he is trying to put his foot down more.
'But where does it come from, this anger? Why do they behave like they do towards us? We have given them everything they could ever want and I am sure we are good parents.'
Dr Friedman says: 'Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant - any more than everyone will turn out to be nice and loving. 'And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behaviour, is hard-wired.
Genetic components cannot be moulded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.
'For better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. That is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame - or credit - for everything that their child becomes.'
For parents like Gloria Harding, the removal of this stigma is a great relief. 'I'm never going to give up on Bobby, he is still my baby,' she says. 'But I have accepted that his behaviour is not my fault. I've spent too long agonising as to what I could, or should not, have done.
'Drugs certainly haven't helped, but they are not the full story. There was something within him that led him to self-destruct. That is the real tragedy, and an insoluble one.' ( dailymail.co.uk )
There is no such thing as bad children - only bad parents has long been the mantra of child experts.
The firm belief being that an individual is shaped by nurture and not pre-decided by nature.
After all, studies have shown us that offspring of the violent and abusive often turn out to be highly troubled adults themselves. But what if a child is born into a loving, caring home and still goes off the rails?
And what if the child's siblings, who have been raised in that same loving household, have turned out perfectly fine - whose fault is it then?
Perfect start to life: Gloria Harding raised her son Bobby, right aged seven, in a loving home but he still went off the rails
Astonishingly, some psychiatrists accept that previous thinking was flawed and that some children, through no fault of the parents, are simply bad seeds. In other words: born bad.
Gloria Harding is one mother who is relieved to learn of this new theory after years of questioning her parenting skills when her once promising son became a violent, aggressive drug user.
The low point came when Gloria, a retired marketing consultant, had to take refuge in her own house while Bobby, then 18, screamed abuse at her as he systematically smashed up the five-bedroom family home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.
He had been brought up with every possible advantage, including a private education, but Gloria was at her wits' end over her son. The happy, sweet-natured boy who had shown such early promise had grown into a teenager who was completely out of control.
'I thought I must have been a terrible mother, but the truth was that Bobby was only ever wanted, loved, praised and encouraged, as was his sister.'
Gloria lives with her husband Trevor (Bobby's stepfather) in the £1.5 million house in which Bobby was brought up. Her son, meanwhile, is 27 and living in residential care after a series of violent and distressing episodes that left Gloria and Trevor unable to have him in the family home.
By comparison, his 31-year-old sister is a loving, responsible parent. So was Bobby simply a bad seed?
'I became terrified of my own son. I feared for my safety after he threatened me with a screwdriver'
In a recent article in The New York Times, respected psychiatrist Dr Richard Friedman admitted that his profession is beginning to accept that some children are 'toxic'. '
For years, mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good unless influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behaviour, there must be a bad parent behind it,' he says.
'Yet the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children.'
Certainly, Gloria can't identify any reason why Bobby should have become so violent.
'He was a lovely child. I sent him to a private prep school, and that's when our problems began,' she says. 'He became disruptive in class and struggled to learn. I feel he was dyslexic - but his behaviour exceeded this relatively straight- forward problem.
'I took him out of private school and put him into a state school, where they were willing to get a statement of special needs for him - his private school didn't want to know and I felt isolated, as if it was my fault. Meanwhile, his sister excelled at the same school.'
Gloria was working full-time and employed a nanny to help care for her children. She and Bobby's father divorced when he was eight and, a year later, she married Trevor, who has been a consistent and loving father figure to Bobby.
'We weren't overly strict with him, and he was brought up in a very caring home. He had everything, materially, he could ever have wanted,' says Gloria. 'He rode bikes with his friends, we had lovely holidays, he was a great skier and scuba diver. Yet he could not settle - there was something "not right" within him. There was so much anger inside him.'
At state school he attained six GCSEs, then went to agricultural college, where he started to experiment with drugs, which only fuelled his aggressive behaviour. Gloria struggled to cope.
'We had to keep every door in the house locked. He would punch holes in his bedroom walls, scream and break things,' she says. 'He once threw all the contents of his bedroom out of the window. I became terrified of my own son. In the end I called social services and the police because I feared for my safety after he threatened me with a screwdriver.'
Bobby was professionally assessed and ruled not to be mentally ill, but a 'drug addict with behavioural problems'.
Events culminated with Bobby stealing his mother's Jaguar XK8, wrapping it round a tree and cracking his pelvis. Over the next year he was charged with criminal damage and sent to Feltham Young Offenders Prison in West London.
Since then he has served sentences in a further three secure units. 'I will never stop loving him and I will never desert him, but I fear so much for his future. I am tormented by the thought that maybe it is all my fault,' says Gloria.
'I believe his cannabis use was a highly destructive influence. Maybe, somewhere, I did something wrong, but for the life of me I can't think what.'
'Our twins shouted, swore, kicked and threw things at us. We were close to the end of our tether'
Leading British child psychologist Dr Pat Spungin says: 'There will always be children who are much more difficult to parent than others. While I am reluctant to label children bad seeds, I think certain children are born with much less susceptibility to influence.
'Psychologists recognise that there are temperamental differences in babies from birth. The nature versus nurture argument will always be an ongoing one, but I know, from my own work, that there are children who are born with less empathy and understanding of people and who care much less about the consequences of their actions and the effects on other people.'
This is something with which Carole Heywood can strongly identify. Carole, who lives in Guildford, Surrey, is an accountant and mother of three. For the past seven years, she has been enduring a living hell with her 19-year-old son, Mark.
Though he'd been a relatively happy and secure child, at 12 he began to rebel. To Carole's bewilderment he started drinking, experimenting with drugs and skipping school.
'We treated all our three children exactly the same, and I have rarely a moment's worry with his brother or sister. But Mark became like a wild thing,' she says.
'He'd previously been a good student but at 13 he was expelled from school. I could not see where this had come from. He was put into a unit for excluded children, and at one stage had home tuition.
'Our lives became a living hell because of his unruly behaviour. All the hopes and dreams I'd had for him - growing up, going to university, getting married and having children - have all gone.'
In a bid to get him to stay at the unit, Carole would drive him there herself, but he'd jump out of the car and run off, sometimes disappearing for days. At home, he smashed windows and doors, and swore at and threatened his brother and sister.
At 15, he tipped a kettle of boiling water over his sister. 'I yelled at Mark, saying he could have killed her, but he just shrugged. He didn't give a fig. My son felt like a stranger. I didn't know who he was,' says Carole.
Mark was arrested for assaulting his sister and taken into the care of social services. Carole admits it sounds like a plotline from EastEnders, not something she ever expected to happen in her comfortable, middle-class home.
'I had to have a panic alarm put into my house, in case my son turned up and tried to hurt me,' she says. Mark was put onto an anger management course and given counselling. But still he returned to the house, stealing the family's DVD player, mobile phones and anything he could sell for drug money.
'He's facing charges for criminal assault,' says Carole. 'Where has this come from? This isn't a child who has been dragged up. He's had a secure, comfortable upbringing with two parents who love him.
'Today, I love him, but I don't like him. His behaviour drove me to a nervous breakdown because I thought I was to blame. Now, though, I think he is simply toxic and not a good person.
'There is no empathy, no understanding of other people's suffering and all he ever thinks about is himself. He's often on the phone to me, about how everything is so unfair and his life is a mess. But he had every chance and threw it all away.'
Another leading child psychiatrist, Dr Theodore Shapiro, says: 'The era of "There are no bad children, only bad parents" is gone. The central pitch of any child psychiatrist now is that the illness is often in the child. The family response may aggravate it, but not wholly create it.'
WHO KNEW?
Behavioural problems in boys have doubled in the past 25 years and teenagers who binge-drink are twice as likely to have a criminal conviction by the time they reach 30
George and Nicole Douglas, ten-year-old twins, were born with every possible advantage. Their parents, Doug, 55, and Sandra, 49, dote on them and work hard to give them the best possible life. There is a swimming pool in the back garden, holidays abroad, endless treats and new clothes - and yet they have often made their parents' lives hell.
Doug, who is a customer services agent, lives with Sandra, who works in administration, in Stanwell, Middlesex.
'I can only think that we have given them too much. They are much better now, but when they were younger we would be covered in bruises,' he says. 'They shouted, swore, kicked and threw things at us. We were close to the end of our tether.'
Being twins, Doug feels they ganged up against their parents. 'We never raised a hand or a voice to our children. Both of us grew up in poor, but loving households, and we wanted to give our children everything, materially, we hadn't had,' he says.
Eerily, the twins began speaking their own private language, terrorising their parents.
'They knew their rights, too,' says Doug. 'If I tried to tell them off, they said: "I'll call Childline!" We didn't know what to do.'
Both children were well-behaved out of the home, and, Doug says, 'positive angels' at school. 'They're bright and good at sport. Things come easily to them. 'I just sometimes feel I don't know them. I don't know what they are thinking, ever. They'll be perfect at school, then they come home and the trouble starts.'
The situation, he says, is getting better and he is trying to put his foot down more.
'But where does it come from, this anger? Why do they behave like they do towards us? We have given them everything they could ever want and I am sure we are good parents.'
Dr Friedman says: 'Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant - any more than everyone will turn out to be nice and loving. 'And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behaviour, is hard-wired.
Genetic components cannot be moulded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.
'For better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. That is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame - or credit - for everything that their child becomes.'
For parents like Gloria Harding, the removal of this stigma is a great relief. 'I'm never going to give up on Bobby, he is still my baby,' she says. 'But I have accepted that his behaviour is not my fault. I've spent too long agonising as to what I could, or should not, have done.
'Drugs certainly haven't helped, but they are not the full story. There was something within him that led him to self-destruct. That is the real tragedy, and an insoluble one.' ( dailymail.co.uk )
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